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His new book, Skiing with Henry Knox, traces two journeys that took place nearly 250 years apart on routes that never intersect. It’s part outdoor adventure tale and part history lesson. But it’s also a multi-layered love story. The central conflict, and the thread that ties the two journeys together, is one of opposing allegiances.
In the winter of 1775-76, Knox, a Boston bookseller turned army colonel, led a small group of men on a 300-mile journey from Boston to Fort Ticonderoga, N.Y., where they seized 60 tons of cannons and other artillery and brought them back to Boston on ox sleds, traversing rivers, lakes and snow-covered fields. In the winter of 2015, Brakeley skied end-to-end the Catamount Trail, a 300-mile route that spans the length of Vermont, a feat that only a few other skiers have accomplished.
Patriotism propelled Knox on his journey, but the mission parted him from the love of his life while she was pregnant with their first child. Equally committed to his quest, Brakeley set out with none of Knox’s moral clarity. He was torn between following his long-time girlfriend across the country and staying in the community he’d come to love, and he hoped his time on the trail would help him choose his path in life.
Braiding that personal element into the book didn’t come easily. One of Brakeley’s professors at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, had urged him to share more of his life in his writing.
“I pushed back against that. I wasn’t really comfortable putting myself in it,” said Brakeley, 32, sipping coffee at Blue Sparrow Kitchen in Norwich on Monday morning. “I just wanted to write about the nuts and bolts.”
Unable to find a publisher for his first two manuscripts, in which he retraced the routes of other historic adventurers, Brakeley decided to heed his professor’s advice. The personal layers — and Knox’s late-in-life residency in Maine — helped Brakeley clinch a book deal with Islandport Press in Yarmouth, Maine.
They also offer another entry point for readers. “I continue to be surprised by the number of different ways people get excited about it,” said Brakeley, who has encountered history buffs, endurance athletes, cross-country skiing enthusiasts and broader audiences at his promotional events.
Brakeley grew up in North Andover, Mass., in a family that prized outdoor excursions. “My childhood was always one activity after another,” he writes in the book. “Dad’s philosophy has always been that any moment not engaged in some physical endeavor is a moment wasted and lost forever.”
In 2006, Brakeley met Elizabeth on a four-day orientation trip for Colby College freshmen and commenced a “tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship.” After college, they went their separate ways, only to wind up together again in 2012 when Elizabeth was accepted at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and Brakeley, between jobs, suggested they give their relationship another shot. They moved together to Norwich, and Brakeley started a stone masonry and trail construction business called Hermit Woods Trailbuilders.
As their relationship deepened, so did Brakeley’s love of the region. “As time has gone by, driving around here, I look left and look right and see work that I’ve done,” said Brakeley, whose father grew up in Middlebury, Vt., and who has relatives in Vermont. “It gives me a very strong connection to the community.”
But Elizabeth had farther-flung ambitions. Denver and Salt Lake City were her top picks for residency programs, and in 2015 she learned she’d be going to Utah. Brakeley suddenly faced a dilemma: move with Elizabeth, leaving behind his New England roots and his business, or stay put and lose the woman he loved.
For a while, Brakeley had been pondering skiing the Catamount Trail, a route begun by three college students in 1984 and completed in 2007. A longtime history enthusiast, he’d also become interested in Knox’s journey, which proved pivotal in the Revolutionary War, while researching a paddling expedition undertaken by Benedict Arnold (before he turned traitor).
The two journeys came together in Brakeley’s mind one night while he was driving home from work. Though they didn’t connect or overlap — and retracing Knox’s route would have amounted to nothing more than a road trip — they were nearly identical in length, and both involved enduring winter’s abuse.
As Brakeley considered the decision ahead of him, he realized he had another thing in common with Knox, who was deeply in love with his new wife, Lucy, when he embarked on his dangerous mission.
Plus, Brakeley needed to get some distance from his dilemma and give himself time to think. “More than ever, I needed the outdoors to help bring clarity to my muddled mind,” he writes in the book.
So in January 2015, Brakeley set out on the Catamount Trail at the state’s southern border, copies of Knox’s journals and letters and his own journal stuffed in his backpack along with his outdoor gear.
“As always in my trips, I was trying to get a better appreciation for what it took for him to do what he did,” Brakeley said. “When I was in my tent at night in the dark and the cold, reading in his journal about him being in the dark and the cold … that is a far better way to understand and appreciate his experience.”
The three-week journey tested Brakeley’s endurance and winter survival skills, although, unlike Knox, he was seldom far from civilization. In fact, his encounters along the way with people who gave him rides and food and listened to his tales give the book some of its heart.
“It’s affirming to me. If you’re doing something unique, interesting, cool, people want to be a part of it,” Brakeley said.
Both expeditions accomplished their goals as well. Knox successfully delivered cannons and ammunition to troops in Boston, contributing to a key victory over the British, and Brakeley figured out what his heart wanted.
Life took another turn after Brakeley’s skiing odyssey, as life does.
“But what happened afterward doesn’t change the story,” said Brakeley, who, now living in Sharon, continues to run his masonry business and is working on another adventure book, in which he retraces British Major Robert Rogers’ journey from Fort Crown Point in New York to St. Francis in Canada during the French and Indian War.
Brakeley also continues to ponder the tension between two of the driving forces in his life: his urge to explore and his love of home, whatever that may be.
Gabriella Tsakiris, of Lebanon, was 12 when she started writing her YA adventure/romance novel, Escape the Woods. She stuck with it, and now, at 17, she’s sharing it with the world. Published through Fearless Publishing under the name Gabriella Catherine, the book tells the story of a young woman confined to a castle by her overprotective father until one day she leaves town and is kidnapped. A book launch party is scheduled for Saturday from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Kilton Public Library.
Blanch Nutting, of Charlestown, grew up in Maine in a house full of children with few modern conveniences. Her self-published book, Wealth Beyond Riches, which came out last year, celebrates family adventures and her Christian values. Drawing on interviews with numerous family members, it tells both harrowing and humorous stories such as when the family car plunged into a swollen stream and the whole family had to climb onto the roof, or how a fawn took up residence with the family one year. The book is available at Violet’s Book Exchange in Claremont and Morgan Hill Book Store in New London, as well as online through Amazon.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.